ESO-MIDAS Documentation

ESO-MIDAS is decribed in full detail in a number of documents. These
cover the needs for MIDAS users, describe the installation procedure
of ESO-MIDAS, give support to those who intend to develop MIDAS applications,
and finally inform the user community about recent developments.
All documents are shortly described below and are available via the

The MIDAS Installation Guide

ESO-MIDAS User's Guide

Three volumes describing the MIDAS core system, the applications,
and the help files:

Volume A
Describes the basic MIDAS system with all general purpose
facilities such as MIDAS Control Language, all available commands,
data input/output (including plotting and image display), table
system (MIDAS Data Base). Site specific features are given in
an appendix.

Volume B
Describes how to use the MIDAS system for astronomical data
reduction. Application packages for special types of data or
reductions (e.g. long slit and echelle spectra, object search, or
crowded field photometry) are discussed assuming intensity
calibrated data. A set of appendices gives a detailed description
of the reduction of raw data from ESO instruments.
If you want to use DAOPHOT II (see chapter DAOPHOT II: The Next
Generation), you should download the postscript
manual (which is not included in Volume B!) from here:
Download DAOPHOT II manual (postscript file)
Unfortunately we cannot offer any other file format.

Volume C
Volume C gave the on-line detailed description for all commands
available.
This volume is not available anymore as it can be accessed via the
Midas GUI XHelp (from the shell with
helpmidas
or from Midas with
create/gui help).

A document describing the guideline for the development of MIDAS
application code either in FORTRAN or in C. It contains a description
if the MIDAS environment with it various data structure and the
subroutine/fucntion calls in FORTRAN or C to access these structures.
A compressed PostScript version of this
document is also available.

The AGL Reference Manual

The MIDAS graphic applications are based on low level graphic routines
provided by the Astronet Graphic Library (AGL) and written by the ASTRONET
Group. Although the MIDAS Environment includes a set of standard
graphic interfaces, there may be cases where the basic functionalities
provided by AGL are required. AGL routines are available in FORTRAN and C.
The implementation of AGL in MIDAS is a stripped version of the
complete AGL library. The complete distribution can be obtained from
the anonymous ftp account of the
Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri in Florence .

The IDI Reference Manual

Similar to the AGL graphics library, the IDI library contains a set
of display routines provided in C and FORTRAN.

Other Information

Apart for this "standard" set of documentation, the MIDAS Users community
is provided with four other sources of information:

The MIDAS system has been described in various papers. General overviews can
be found in Banse et al. (1983) and in Grøsbol and Ponz
(1990). MIDAS as a development environment is discussed in the
document ``MIDAS Environment'' (ESO-IPG, 1993) and by Banse et al.
(1991). The performance of MIDAS on different platform is described
by Grøsbol et al., 1988. The implementation of the table
file system is described by Grosbøl and Ponz, 1985. For a more
complete reference list, see References.

The ESO-MIDAS Courier was a newsletter
which informed the user about recent developments concerning MIDAS, in
particular about new releases, new applications, and availability of patch
levels.
Because of the increasing usage of providing information via the WWW
the newsletter was discontinued in 1995.